The CIA Coined the Term Conspiracy Theorist In 1967

That all changed in the 1960s.

Specifically, in April 1967, the CIA wrote
a dispatch which coined the term “conspiracy theories” … and
recommended methods for discrediting such theories. The dispatch was
marked “psych” – short for “psychological operations” or disinformation
– and “CS” for the CIA’s “Clandestine Services” unit.

The dispatch was produced in responses to a Freedom of Information Act request by the New York Times in 1976.

The dispatch states:

2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization.

***

The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists,
so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries.
Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a
number of unclassified attachments.

3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the [conspiracy]
question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where
discussion is active addresses are requested:

a. To discuss the publicity problem with and friendly elite contacts
(especially politicians and editors) , pointing out that the [official
investigation of the relevant event] made as thorough an investigation
as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious
foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the
hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy
talk appear to be deliberately generated by … propagandists. Urge them
to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible
speculation.

b. To employ propaganda assets to and refute the attacks of
the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly
appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to
this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to
assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are
(I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (II) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories.

***

4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular
writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the
following arguments should be useful:

a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider.

***

b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent–and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) …

***

c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc.

***

d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other.

***

f. As to charges that the Commission’s report was a rush job, it
emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the
degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was
largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation
already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who,
refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms.

g. Such vague accusations as that “more than ten people have died mysteriously” can always be explained in some natural way ….

5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to
the Commission’s Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still
be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with
which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.

Here are screenshots of part of the memo:

Summarizing the tactics which the CIA dispatch recommended:

Claim that it would be impossible for so many people would keep quiet about such a big conspiracy

Accuse theorists of being wedded to and infatuated with their theories

Accuse theorists of being politically motivated

Accuse theorists of having financial interests in promoting conspiracy theories

In other words, the CIA’s clandestine services unit created the
arguments for attacking conspiracy theories as unreliable in the 1960s
as part of its psychological warfare operations.

But Aren’t Conspiracy Theories – In Fact – Nuts?

Forget Western history and CIA dispatches … aren’t conspiracy theorists nutty?In fact, conspiracies are so common that judges are trained to look at conspiracy allegations as just another legal claim to be disproven or proven based on the specific evidence:

Federal and all 50 state’scodes include specific statutes addressing conspiracy, and providing the punishment for people who commit conspiracies.

But let’s examine what the people trained to weigh evidence and reach
conclusions think about “conspiracies”. Let’s look at what American judges think.

Searching Westlaw,
one of the 2 primary legal research networks which attorneys and judges
use to research the law, I searched for court decisions including the
word “Conspiracy”. This is such a common term in lawsuits that it
overwhelmed Westlaw.

Specifically, I got the following message:

“Your query has been intercepted because it may retrieve a large number of documents.”

From experience, I know that this means that there were potentially
millions or many hundreds of thousands of cases which use the term.
There were so many cases, that Westlaw could not even start processing
the request.

So I searched again, using the phrase “Guilty of Conspiracy”. I hoped
that this would not only narrow my search sufficiently that Westlaw
could handle it, but would give me cases where the judge actually found
the defendant guilty of a conspiracy. This pulled up exactly 10,000
cases — which is the maximum number of results which Westlaw can give at
one time. In other words, there were more than 10,000 cases using the
phrase “Guilty of Conspiracy” (maybe there’s a way to change my settings
to get more than 10,000 results, but I haven’t found it yet).

Moreover, as any attorney can confirm, usually only appeal court
decisions are published in the Westlaw database. In other words, trial
court decisions are rarely published; the only decisions normally
published are those of the courts which hear appeals of the trial.
Because only a very small fraction of the cases which go to trial are
appealed, this logically means that the number of guilty verdicts in
conspiracy cases at trial must be much, much larger than 10,000.

Moreover, “Guilty of Conspiracy” is only one of many possible search
phrases to use to find cases where the defendant was found guilty of a
lawsuit for conspiracy. Searching on Google, I got 3,170,000 results (as of yesterday) under the term “Guilty of Conspiracy”, 669,000 results for the search term “Convictions for Conspiracy”, and 743,000 results for “Convicted for Conspiracy”.

Of course, many types of conspiracies are called other things
altogether. For example, a long-accepted legal doctrine makes it illegal
for two or more companies to conspire to fix prices, which is called
“Price Fixing” (1,180,000 results).

Given the above, I would extrapolate that there have been hundreds of
thousands of convictions for criminal or civil conspiracy in the United
States.

Finally, many crimes go unreported or unsolved, and the perpetrators
are never caught. Therefore, the actual number of conspiracies committed
in the U.S. must be even higher.

In other words, conspiracies are committed all the time in the U.S.,
and many of the conspirators are caught and found guilty by American
courts. Remember, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was a conspiracy theory.

Indeed, conspiracy is a very well-recognized crime in American law,
taught to every first-year law school student as part of their basic
curriculum. Telling a judge that someone has a “conspiracy
theory” would be like telling him that someone is claiming that he
trespassed on their property, or committed assault, or stole his car. It
is a fundamental legal concept.

Obviously, many conspiracy allegations are false (if you see a judge
at a dinner party, ask him to tell you some of the crazy conspiracy
allegations which were made in his court). Obviously, people will either
win or lose in court depending on whether or not they can prove their
claim with the available evidence. But not all allegations of trespass,
assault, or theft are true, either.

Proving a claim of conspiracy is no different from proving any other
legal claim, and the mere label “conspiracy” is taken no less seriously
by judges.

It’s not only Madoff. The heads of Enron were found guilty of conspiracy, as was the head of Adelphia. Numerous lower-level government officials have been found guilty of conspiracy.

Most good investigative reporters are conspiracy theorists, by the way.

And what about the NSA and the tech companies that have cooperated with them?

But Our Leaders Wouldn’t Do That

While people might admit that corporate executives and low-level
government officials might have engaged in conspiracies – they may be
strongly opposed to considering that the wealthiest or most powerful
might possibly have done so.

But powerful insiders have long admitted to conspiracies. For
example, Obama’s Administrator of the Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein, wrote:

Of
course some conspiracy theories, under our definition, have turned out
to be true. The Watergate hotel room used by Democratic National
Committee was, in fact, bugged by Republican officials, operating at the
behest of the White House. In the 1950s, the Central Intelligence
Agency did, in fact, administer LSD and related drugs under Project
MKULTRA, in an effort to investigate the possibility of “mind control.”
Operation Northwoods, a rumored plan by the Department of Defense to
simulate acts of terrorism and to blame them on Cuba, really was
proposed by high-level officials ….

But Someone Would Have Spilled the Beans

A common defense to people trying sidetrack investigations into
potential conspiracies is to say that “someone would have spilled the
beans” if there were really a conspiracy.But famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg explains:

It
is a commonplace that “you can’t keep secrets in Washington” or “in a
democracy, no matter how sensitive the secret, you’re likely to read it
the next day in the New York Times.” These truisms are flatly false.
They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading
journalists and their readers, part of the process of keeping secrets
well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn’t in a
fully totalitarian society. But the fact is that the overwhelming
majority of secrets do not leak to the American public. This is true
even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it
is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power
and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality
unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is
that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be
kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even
though they are known to thousands of insiders.

There was “a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by a group of right-wing
American businessmen . . . . The coup was aimed at toppling President
Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The
plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families
in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse &
George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should
adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression”

The government’s spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this.) But the public didn’t learn about it until many years later. Indeed, the the New York Times delayed the story so that it would not affect the outcome of the 2004 presidential election

The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before 9/11. And top British officials say
that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change one month after Bush took
office. Dick Cheney apparently even made Iraqi’s oil fields a national
security priority before 9/11. And it has now been shown that a handful of people
were responsible for willfully ignoring the evidence that Iraq lacked
weapons of mass destruction. These facts have only been publicly
disclosed recently. Indeed, Tom Brokaw said, “All wars are based on propaganda.” A concerted effort to produce propaganda is a conspiracy

Moreover, high-level government officials and insiders have admitted to dramatic conspiracies after the fact, including:

These examples show that it is possible to keep conspiracies secret for a long time, without anyone “spilling the beans”.

In addition, to anyone who knows how covert military operations work,
it is obvious that segmentation on a “need-to-know basis”, along with
deference to command hierarchy, means that a couple of top dogs can call
the shots and most people helping won’t even know the big picture at the time they are participating.

Moreover, those who think that co-conspirators will brag about their
deeds forget that people in the military or intelligence or who have
huge sums of money on the line can be very disciplined. They are not
likely to go to the bar and spill the beans like a down-on-their-luck,
second-rate alcoholic robber might do.

Finally, people who carry out covert operations may do so for
ideological reasons — believing that the “ends justify the means”. Never
underestimate the conviction of an ideologue.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that some conspiracy claims are nutty and some are true. Each has to be judged on its own facts.

Humans have a tendency to try to explain random events through seeing
patterns … that’s how our brains our wired. Therefore, we have to test
our theories of connection and causality against the cold, hard facts.

On the other hand, the old saying by Lord Acton is true:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.

Those who operate without checks and balances – and without the
disinfectant sunlight of public scrutiny and accountability – tend to
act in their own best interests … and the little guy gets hurt.

The early Greeks knew it, as did those who forced the king to sign
the Magna Carta, the Founding Fathers and the father of modern
economics. We should remember this important tradition of Western
civilization.

The wealthy are not worse than other people … but they are not necessarily better either. Powerful leaders may not be bad people … or they could be sociopaths.We must judge each by his or her actions, and not by preconceived
stereotypes that they are all saints acting in our best interest or all
scheming criminals.And see ...

We need to remember that, psychopaths and other personality disordered individuals really have no choice but to be what they are; they are like forces of nature. But normal human beings DO have a choice as to whether they will accept abuse or not. By accepting abuse, they give power to the psychopaths to abuse others so it is not just a matter of self-preservation; it is a matter of making sure that our children have a future. It seems that, in a world where the people cannot or will not, rise up against psychopathy in power, the Cosmos will do it for them, and take them out as well for their silence and their weakness. The bottom line is, nobody and no event is going to “save” anyone. It is only human beings, individually and collectively, who have the power to BE salvation.” – Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Plans for control of the evil forces that have been loosed in the world, attempts to compensate the evil- doing by good works or sympathy for the victims, efforts to safeguard the peace or to effect ideal solutions of all the material problems involved, can do little to change the nature of the situation. The real problem, namely, the question of what can be done for civilization in face of the nonhuman forces arising from the collective unconscious in thousands or rather millions of individual persons, will remain untouched. However, if only one human being has met and solved the problem in himself, he will be a living demonstration of a solution. Such an individual carries with him the germ of a renaissance of the spiritual values of mankind.

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